0
ForwardShop

Advice

Time Management is Dead. Long Live Time Ownership!

Related Resources:

Right, let's get one thing straight from the jump: every time management "guru" selling you productivity hacks is probably making bank while you're still drowning in emails at 9pm on a Tuesday. Been there, bought the fancy planner, downloaded the apps, colour-coded my calendar like a rainbow exploded on it.

Complete waste of time.

After 17 years of running teams across Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth, I've watched more productivity systems crash and burn than a Nokia phone factory in 2007. The problem isn't your system. It's your mindset. You're trying to manage time when you should be owning it.

The Brutal Truth About Why Your Time Management Sucks

Here's what nobody tells you at those overpriced seminars in Collins Street conference rooms: 84% of people who implement new time management systems abandon them within six weeks. Not because they're lazy. Because they're trying to squeeze their actual life into someone else's theoretical framework.

I learned this the hard way in 2018 when I spent three months religiously following David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. Fantastic system. Worked brilliantly for about two weeks until my biggest client decided to restructure their entire procurement process on a Wednesday afternoon. Suddenly my beautifully organised "someday/maybe" lists looked like a joke.

Traditional time management treats time like a renewable resource you can optimise. Wrong. Time is the one thing you can't manufacture, negotiate with, or buy more of. Ask any tradie billing $150 an hour - they'll tell you time isn't managed, it's invested.

Stop Managing, Start Owning

The difference between time management and time ownership is like the difference between renting and buying a house. When you rent, you follow someone else's rules, paint the walls beige, and hope nothing breaks. When you own, you knock down walls, install that spa bath, and take responsibility for every decision.

Time ownership means accepting that perfect productivity is a myth sold by people who've never had to explain budget overruns to a board of directors while their toddler has a meltdown during a Zoom call.

Real time ownership starts with three non-negotiable principles that I wish someone had told me before I wasted my thirties trying to be a productivity machine.

Principle 1: Energy Trumps Everything

Your grandmother was onto something when she said "timing is everything." She just didn't realise she was talking about energy management, not clock management.

I used to schedule my most demanding work first thing Monday morning because some productivity expert said "eat the frog." Brilliant advice if you're a morning person who peaks at 6am. Terrible advice if you're someone like me who doesn't hit their stride until after the second coffee and preferably not before 10am.

Track your energy patterns for two weeks. Not your tasks, your energy. When do you feel sharp? When do you feel creative? When do you feel like you could wrestle a kangaroo? These are your golden hours. Protect them like they're the last Tim Tam in the packet.

Most people get this backwards. They'll schedule a crucial client presentation at 2pm on Friday - statistically the worst time for cognitive performance - then wonder why it went poorly. Meanwhile, they're answering emails during their peak creative hours because "emails are quick."

Emails are never quick. They're productivity quicksand.

Principle 2: Boundaries Aren't Suggestions

The biggest lie in modern workplace culture is that being available equals being valuable. Being constantly accessible doesn't make you indispensable. It makes you a doormat with excellent response times.

I spent years believing that answering emails within 30 minutes made me a responsive professional. What it actually made me was a stressed-out mess who couldn't complete a single deep work session without interruption. My team started treating my time like a 24-hour emergency helpline.

Here's the reality check: Most "urgent" requests aren't urgent, they're just loud. The difference between urgent and important is the difference between someone else's poor planning and your actual priorities.

Set communication windows. I check emails three times a day: 9am, 1pm, and 5pm. That's it. My team knows this. My clients know this. If something's genuinely urgent, they have my mobile number. In three years of doing this, I've received exactly four truly urgent calls.

The rest? Could have waited until the next email window.

Principle 3: Perfect Systems Are Productivity Theatre

Stop trying to build the perfect productivity system. Perfect systems are what consultants sell to people who think there's a magic formula for controlling chaos. Life isn't a spreadsheet, and neither is effective time ownership.

Your system should be ugly, personal, and functional. Mine looks like a dogs breakfast: A physical notebook for immediate capture, Google Calendar for hard deadlines, and a simple task list app that syncs across devices. Nothing fancy. Nothing that requires a user manual.

The best system is the one you'll actually use when you're tired, stressed, or dealing with competing priorities. Most people design their productivity systems on their best days, then wonder why they fail on their worst days.

I've tried Notion, Todoist, Omnifocus, and about fifteen other apps that promised to revolutionise my workflow. You know what revolutionised my workflow? Accepting that I'm not a robot, my days aren't identical, and sometimes good enough is actually good enough.

The Australian Way: Practical Time Ownership

Let's talk about what time ownership looks like in real Australian workplaces, not Silicon Valley fantasyland.

First, acknowledge that you're probably overcommitted. Australians are terrible at saying no because we're culturally wired to be helpful. Being helpful is lovely. Being helpful to the point of burnout helps nobody.

Start with a brutal audit of your commitments. List everything you do in a typical week. Everything. Including those "quick coffee chats" that somehow stretch to 90 minutes and accomplish nothing beyond reinforcing why you avoid networking events.

Now ask yourself: What would happen if I stopped doing this? If the answer is "nothing significant," that's your first candidate for elimination.

Second, batch similar activities together. Don't answer emails between meetings. Don't make phone calls scattered throughout the day. Don't schedule one-off tasks randomly. Group similar work together and do it in focused blocks. This isn't rocket science, but it's harder than it sounds because it requires saying no to reactive mode.

Third, build buffer time into everything. If you think a project will take four hours, schedule six. If you think a meeting will run for 30 minutes, block out 45. Australian projects run over budget and schedule about as reliably as Melbourne weather predictions.

Why Most Time Management Training is Useless

Having sat through countless time management workshops over the years, I can tell you most of them focus on the wrong things. They teach you how to use tools, not how to think differently about time.

Tools are easy. Thinking is hard.

The best time management insight I ever received came from a gruff old project manager in Darwin who told me: "Mate, you can't manage time. Time does whatever it wants. You can only manage yourself in relation to time."

Sounds obvious, but it's profound. Time management isn't about squeezing more tasks into your day. It's about choosing better tasks and doing them with focused attention.

Most productivity advice treats human beings like efficiency machines. We're not. We're complicated creatures with emotions, relationships, health issues, and unpredictable lives. Any time management approach that doesn't account for this is doomed from the start.

The Reality of Modern Time Ownership

Let's address the elephant in the room: Remote work has simultaneously made time ownership easier and harder. Easier because you're not commuting for two hours a day. Harder because the boundaries between work and life have dissolved like sugar in rain.

Working from home doesn't automatically make you more productive. It makes you more responsible for your own productivity. Some people thrive with this responsibility. Others discover they're excellent at finding creative ways to avoid work while technically being "at work."

If you're struggling with remote time ownership, the solution isn't more apps or stricter schedules. It's creating physical and psychological boundaries that signal when you're in work mode versus life mode.

Change your clothes. Seriously. Don't spend the day in pyjamas and wonder why you feel unproductive. Your brain needs signals that you're switching between different modes of being.

What Actually Works (And Why)

After years of experimenting with different approaches, here's what I've found that consistently works for time ownership:

Weekly Reviews, Not Daily Planning: Spend 20 minutes every Sunday evening reviewing the coming week. Not planning every minute, just identifying the three most important outcomes you need to achieve. Everything else is secondary.

Time Blocking, Not Task Lists: Block time for types of work, not specific tasks. "Creative work" is more useful than "Write proposal for Smith project" because creative work is flexible enough to adapt when Smith calls and changes everything.

Energy Management Over Time Management: Schedule demanding work during your peak energy hours. Schedule routine work during your low energy periods. This alone will double your effectiveness.

The Two-Minute Rule: If something takes less than two minutes, do it immediately. If it takes more than two minutes, either schedule it properly or delegate it. Don't let small tasks accumulate into productivity quicksand.

Single-Tasking: Multitasking is productivity mythology. Your brain can't actually do two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously. What you're really doing is rapid task-switching, which is exhausting and inefficient.

The hardest part about implementing these principles isn't learning them. It's consistently applying them when you're tired, stressed, or dealing with competing priorities. That's why simple systems beat complex ones every time.

When Good Enough Becomes Great

Here's my controversial opinion: Perfectionism is the enemy of good time ownership. I've watched brilliant people spend three hours perfecting a presentation that needed to be good enough, while completely neglecting three other projects that actually mattered.

The 80/20 rule isn't just about business outcomes. It applies to time investment too. 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. The challenge is identifying which 20% actually matters and having the courage to deprioritise everything else.

This means accepting that some things will be done to a "good enough" standard. Your weekly team meeting agenda doesn't need to be a work of art. Your monthly reports don't need perfect formatting. Your email responses don't need to be literary masterpieces.

Save your perfectionism for the work that genuinely matters. Use "good enough" for everything else.

The Bottom Line on Time Ownership

Time ownership isn't about becoming a productivity machine. It's about making conscious choices about how you invest your finite energy and attention. It's about designing a work life that aligns with your actual capabilities and constraints, not some idealised version of who you think you should be.

Stop trying to manage time. Start owning your relationship with it.

Most time management advice assumes you have control over your environment, your workload, and your responsibilities. In reality, you control very little beyond your responses and your choices. Focus on what you can control. Accept what you can't. This isn't profound wisdom - it's practical reality.

The goal isn't to become perfectly productive. The goal is to become intentionally productive. Big difference.

Start there. Everything else is just noise.

Further Reading: